'Helping Rhonda'? & is Michael Moore the Left's Glenn Beck?

Rhonda Byrne may have been a tad late getting to her own party, but the positive-review-athon for The Pow-errrrr appears finally to have kicked in with a vengeance (no doubt with Amazon looking studiously the other way, if not actively participating in the conspiracy). All three of what we used to call "spotlight reviews" for the book are now glowing 5-stars, as are all 10 of the most recent reviews featured in the sidebar.

My negative review has been kicked down the stairs to the cellar...along with a thoughtful and quite-literary take from Kathryn Price that once held sway among the spotlights with a helpful rating of over 70 percent but can no longer compete with the recent slew of 100-percent-helpful 5-stars.

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Speaking of unwarranted hype, last week I finally saw Michael Moore's highly engrossing logical quagmire, Bowling for Columbine. As far as I can tell, here is Moore's thesis:

The words racism and violence have almost the same number of letters, give or take, so draw your own conclusions... Not a single black person ever shot anyone in Detroit before the slave ships began arriving in the 1600s... If rich insensitive white folk didn't like fudge as much as they do, little black kids wouldn't have to take guns to school and shoot their classmates... If you use hairspray, you are probably not a sincere person. (ED. NOTE: On the other hand, if you wear a baseball cap...) The problem is that there are way too many guns around, except in Canada, where there are plenty of guns but the late Charlton Heston never owned a home, so there!... Poverty, meanwhile, is much, much worse when you don't have a lot of money....

Wow. And this film has not only been hailed as "brilliant," but boasts an enviable 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes?

Hey, how come you don't see Jon Stewart and Bill Maher ripping Moore to shreds? Maybe I just missed it....

'And if you need to fill your bank account, write a book loaded with empty thoughts...'

UPDATE, Tuesday, Aug. 24. Now that my take (scroll down) on Rhonda Byrne's The Pow-errrrr has indeed made it to "spotlight" status, there is apparently a massive counterattack underway from the other side. In just the past few hours, my review has accumulated at least 10 "not helpful" votes. Wonder how long I'll be able to "hang".... And let me add that this isn't some sly effort on my part to "sell a few more copies of SHAM ," as some have alleged. My being dour about The Pow-errrrr , as it were, is not going to sell many (if any) copies of my book...as evidenced by the fact that at this writing, SHAM lolls at No. 529,411, down markedly in the past few days despite my sudden visibility on Rhonda's high-traffic page. I feel safe in proposing that there's virtually zero overlap between her target market and my own. =========================== UPDATE, Monda y, Aug. 23. I've never done this, folks, and I really don't b

Placebo: how a sugar pill became a poison pill. Part 9 of a contintuing saga...

Read Part 8 . In 1921, amid the early tumult of prohibition, a remarkable study took shape in Palo Alto, California. Stanford psychologist Lewis Madison Terman—as serious-looking a man as one is apt to find, with hi s specs, upright bearing and unsmiling mien—would one day be remembered most ly for designing and publishing the final accepted version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. In '21, however, Terman began work on another project that may have more lasting import for humankind, despite being known today to just a small circle of “longevity wonks.” Terman proposed to track th e lives of 1528 American children from that point on. His subjects, encountered in the course of his study of intelligence, were all 10 years old. Terman himself was 44; he would follow them and their families for the rest of his life, and he obtained from his younger associates a pledge to do the same after he was gone. The goal was to note what kind of longevity the 10-year-olds achieved, and try to deduc

Election afermath: Score one for The Secret.

What a lot of people miss about the New Age is that in philosophy and tone, it is very much aligned with latter-day conservatism and the sorts of things we saw happening, say, at AIG and Goldman-Sachs before the f all. The Secret , after all, is nothing if not wildly, irredeemably, unapologetically aspirational. Along with its philosophical sibling movements in the megachurches — such as that run by our friend Joel ("the gospel according to Vera Wang") Osteen — The Secret legitimizes the idea of endless upward mobility and a reality in which wealth is not zero-sum, but in fac t can be attained by everyone everywhere at the same time if "you just want it enough." Secret alum Lisa Nichols says it flat-out in the very title of her CD: " You Deserve It !" In the world according to Rhonda Byrne and her (pseudo-)philosophical protégés, every man (and woman) is an island, and all of those islands are the Caymans . Both The Secret and cons ervatism encourage a

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